I’m happily tapping away through über secret fantasy novel, having a lot of fun with it. Think it’s gonna be a long ‘un, though: already looking like it’ll end up bigger than any of the Ketty Jay books! But it’s epic fantasy, right? Whatchagonnado?

I’m hoping to get a proper update done on the site soon, add Velocity to the books and maybe remove some redundant parts like the Press section (which hasn’t been updated since the King James Bible first came out) and the Forum which is sadly deader than Pluto’s hopes of becoming a planet again.

Next year I shall also be attending Eastercon in Manchester and Nine Worlds in London, as by that time I ought to be able to tell y’all something of what I’m working on.

First up, I’M ON TWITTER. You thought it’d never happen, but it did. Befollow me on @_ChrisWooding_ where you can hear splurts of random communications involving whatever I just tripped over that morning. It’s better than waiting for my tri-yearly posts up on here.

In other news, I am embroiled in a deeply secret project about which I can say a few words only. It is a novel. It is a fantasy novel. It is a fantasy novel that actually resembles a fantasy novel instead of being about, like, some weird skewed kind of pseudo-scipunk-bizarro world that just gets put in the fantasy category because nobody knows what the hell else to do with it. When there’s something to officially announce, there’ll be one of those official announcement things, but it won’t be for a while yet. In the meantime, content yourself that I am writing, have been for a while actually, and that there are more books on the way. And I’m very very excited about getting back to scribbling again.

A story of reckless ambition, unshakable friendship and the perils of fame, set in a broken future…

Cassica and Shiara have grown up in an outback settlement far from anywhere. Life’s hard where they live, but these two girls have a dream. Cassica is a talented driver; Shiara her engineer and navigator. Between them they’ve cobbled together a racer. Their mission: to win the Widowmaker, a three-day rally through the most dangerous terrain in the world. Pursuing them will be the Wreckers, a colourful bunch of psychopaths driving monstrous armoured vehicles, hell-bent on destroying any racers they catch. The winners become legends, rich and famous beyond their wildest dreams. The losers don’t survive…

2nd July in the UK, people! Order it here. Or here if you’re buying from overseas.

Also, also! The Gollancz Festival is back! Now in two cities, Manchester on 16th Oct and London on the 17th. After the big bowl of awesomeness that happened last time, I’m looking forward to it! I’ll definitely be at the London one and possibly the one in Manchester too. Will keep you all updated.

… not that you’d know it from the amount of updates on this site! But hey, now I’m here, I have a whole bunch of nothing to tell you anyway! Yay!

When I was a kid, I used to just bang down the first good idea I had, write a book of it, sling it out into the cosmos and move directly on to the next good idea in sequence. These days I’m rather more like a particularly dozy-looking cow chewing a cud in a field in Sussex, gazing placidly at nothing for days, sometimes weeks on end, until I’ve rolled dozens of these good ideas around in my head and tossed out all but one. Then I develop that for a bit, see if it goes anywhere, and if it doesn’t: back to the cud.

Thing is (he said, mixing his metaphors like a $0.79 self-published Amazon fantasy special) you can be the best chef in the world, but once you’ve picked your ingredients, that’s that. Can’t make a lasagna out of chocolate frosting and cake mix. So these days I’m veeeeeery careful about picking my ingredients. Am pulling together ideas for something new and vaguely book-shaped. Between that and a load of screen things I’ve been doing, I’m busy as ever: but as usual, I’ll tell you when anything concrete appears, and not before.

We’re closing in on a cover and a blurb for VELOCITY, will show you when there’s something to show you. But it’ll be out in July (I believe… definitely some month this year with a J in it!). And so I return to my cloak and dagger world of secrets and half-truths, to emerge again when I actually have something of interest to share…

La la la, done and delivered and getting edited now, so all in time for a mid-2015 release (in the UK) which is all still on as far as I know! Blurb and more details to follow nearer the time, there’s no point getting you all excited six months early…

I’m pretty busy writing screen stuff these days, but what’s next book-wise, I really don’t know. I’ve finished up everything I’m contracted for, so I’m going to hibernate and ruminate for a while and have a think about what kind of story I want to do next and what I want to commit the next few years of my life to. Will let you know when I do!

So, I’ve been wasting all my time writing a movie of Malice and everything, and it turns out someone’s already got there first! Specifically, some rather amazing young people from Israel who’ve spent a year making their own film of my book. I am totally awed and humbled by the creativity and effort of these 10-11 (!!!) year olds who with little or no resources managed to create a 40-minute-odd movie out of a book with numerous fantastical elements, monsters etc etc. So without further ado:

MALICE, the movie! Directed by Michael Busheri, produced by Einav Yehezkeli, shown to you by kind permission of parents, cast and crew. It’s quite a thing.

Comments welcome but keep ’em nice. This isn’t 4Chan, and I shoot trolls. Then splash acid on them so they can’t regenerate.

Meanwhile, as far as the other movie goes, I’m prevented from going into detail about where it is in the process but at present we have a script that everybody loves and currently things are rumbling along well enough. As soon as there’s anything official to announce, I’ll announce it.

Motoring through VELOCITY (the eagle-eyed there will spot a clue to the nature of this book…) and on course to deliver it by the end of the year for a June-ish release in 2015. I’d give you a blurb for it, but blurbs give too much away and I haven’t finished it yet and besides, it’s an author’s prerogative to keep secrets, because we’re all massively paranoid someone’s going to steal our ideas and write it before we do.

First up, my trip to Sweden for the SweCon Steampunk Festival in Gävle. It runs from June 27th-29th, and I’ll be doing, like, a ton of panels and interviews and talking about The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray (if I can remember what happened in it!) and Retribution Falls and all things steampunky. I will also be doing a signing and talking about steampunk with Swedish author Nene Ormes on Weds 25th June at 6pm at the Science Fiction Bookshop in Stockholm. Apart from being mildly concerned that I’ll be out-steampunked by everyone there, I’m very excited!

Second, I’ve started on a new book in amid my screenwriting projects. It’s a YA book. It’s kind of science fiction but not really. It’s called VELOCITY. We’re aiming to get it out by the end of summer next year, but no guarantees. And that’s all the information I’m giving out at this stage. Stay tuned for further developments…

Now that is one sexy cover. If only I had a larger version of it. Allow me to quote the starred review it got in Booklist (spoilers ahoy – if you were gonna buy it anyway, don’t read):

“A couple of boys on a biology field trip uncover a silver creature with chitin markings eerily like a computer chip. But it is only the first of many horrible creatures whose scratches turn humans into silver insects—or the Infected. It’s a biological weapon experiment gone awry, a horrifying precursor to an evil world bent on destroying itself. The challenge for a lucky (?) few Mortingham Boarding Academy students: how to survive and perhaps, more importantly, what happens if they do? Wooding has morphed a traditional English boarding school story—bullies, evil headmaster, well-intentioned teacher, and boy/girl drama—into a horror/survival story that would make William Golding and Gary Paulsen envious. The ugly, morphing Infected are graphic, both awe-inspiring and terrifying, as they devour their comrades to become larger, more intelligent, and more vicious. The tension is palpable as a small group of teens gradually out-thinks its few remaining adult leaders, thus leading the scant remaining survivors in a quest to escape. Is “sometimes being nice being stupid” or can goodness actually prevail? Carve out enough time to read Silver in a single sitting. You’ll need it.”

Y’know, even though I have the excuse of being born before the age of social media sapped all meaning out of everything, I’m beginning to suspect I’m a bit slow at this blogging lark. But you’ve all been very patient, and as I’ve just turned 37 I’m literally likely to die at any minute, so here’s an update.

Since I delivered The Ace of Skulls about a year ago, I’ve been writing for the screen. Mostly for TV, actually, as it’s rather more exciting than the movies at the moment. Some of the work I’ve been doing has been writing pilot episodes, crafting series outlines, then sending them off into the aether via my agents. Some of these works pick up interest from producers of other things, who either want to develop them or offer other work, which takes me off in other directions. Over the past year I’ve been really pretty busy, but in this world projects have a long gestation period (comparable to human lifetimes in some cases). Things are gestating nicely, but as I’ve said many times, it’s pointless talking about projects until they are some way down the line as many of them just disappear. Some resurface after years, some don’t.

At various points over the year I’ve been writing for a TV series in production that is, not to put too fine a point on it, goddamn awesome. The project is helmed by a big-name Hollywood screenwriter, there’s a big US network behind it, the concept for the series is fantastic and the writing is of really high quality, and I got to work with a brilliant team of screenwriters planning the series and working on episodes. Yet even a high-profile project like this has a hard time getting to the screen, and it’s currently on hold while people behind the scenes shuffle vast amounts of money around trying to make risk and reward add up. Maybe it’ll kick in again tomorrow and we can get back to work (God, I hope so). Maybe it will be years (I’m told Musketeers, the new big show in the UK, took years and years of torment to bring to the screen). Maybe it’ll quietly die, and that will suck. You’ll get news (and a name for the show) if and when we get the green light again.

I’ve also been working on something else. I know I’m going to regret this, but *whispers quietly* malicemovie

*covers ears as a thousand squees echo throughout the troposphere*.

…

…

*takes hands off ears*

Done? Good. Yep, writing a movie of Malice at the moment, a project for Sky Movies with Kudos producing (they of Life on Mars, Spooks, Broadchurch, and more, and more). Currently tapping through the first draft and having a lot of fun with it. But this is at a very early stage right now, and it’s a long, long journey of development, so hold them horses for a while. Right now we don’t know whether it will be a TV movie or a theatrical release, whether it will end up megabudget or minibudget, who will star, or any of a hundred other variables.

But, still, Malice movie, eh? Hehehe.

Broken Sky ebooks: I’m looking into ways to get them done with the proper level of quality that won’t eat up loads of time that I can’t afford to devote to them. This may or may not be possible. I’ll let you know if it is. I know people out there are waiting – some more patiently than others – and they’d love to get their hands on ebook editions of books that were beloved to them in their younger years. I’m genuinely touched by the enthusiasm and devotion to those stories. But I don’t want to release them until I can put them out in the best version I can, and there’s only one of me. So until I can get someone to help me out with them, they’ll have to wait.

I’ve also been talking about an idea for a new YA book with Scholastic. Once I get up and going on that, I’ll let you know more. But it’s in the pipe.

And that’s your lot! Man, I’m exhausted. Time for a restorative game of Thief.